Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

By Richard Davenport-Hines

What pushed Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby into Soviet hands?

With access to recently released papers and other neglected documents, this sharp analysis of the intelligence world examines how and why these men and others betrayed their country and what this cost Britain and its allies.

Enemies Within is a new history of the influence of Moscow on Britain told through the stories of those who chose to spy for the Soviet Union. It also challenges entrenched assumptions about abused trust, corruption and Establishment cover-ups that began with the Cambridge Five and the disappearance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean on the night boat to Saint-Malo in 1951.

In a book that is as intellectually thrilling as it is entertaining and illuminating, Richard Davenport-Hines traces the bonds between individuals, networks and organisations over generations to offer a study of character, both individual and institutional. At its core lie the operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre.

Davenport-Hines tells many stories of espionage, counter-espionage and treachery. With its vast scope, ambition and scholarship, Enemies Within charts how the undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise and the suspicion of educational advantages began, and how these have transformed the social and political temper of modern Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jan 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780007516681

Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Davenport-Hines won the Wolfson Prize for History for his first book, ‘Dudley Docker’. He is an adviser to the ‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’ and has also written biographies of W.H. Auden and Marcel Proust. His most recent book, ‘Titanic Lives’ was published in 2012. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature, he reviews for the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

Book preview

PART ONE

Rules of the Game

CHAPTER 1

The Moscow Apparatus

When Sir John (‘Jock’) Balfour went as British Minister to Moscow in 1943, he was given sound advice by the American diplomat George Kennan. ‘Although it will be very far from explaining everything,’ Kennan said, ‘it is always worthwhile, whenever the behaviour of the Soviet authorities becomes particularly difficult, to look back into Russian history for a precedent.’ Current ideas and acts, he understood, encase past history. Similarly, in 1946, Frank Roberts surveyed post-war Soviet intentions from his vantage point in Britain’s Moscow embassy. ‘Basically, the Kremlin is now pursuing a Russian national policy, which does not differ except in degree from that pursued in the past by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Catherine the Great.’ The chief difference between imperial and Stalinist Russia, according to Roberts, was that Soviet leaders covered their aims in the garb of Marxist-Leninist ideology, in which they believed with a faith as steadfast as that of the Jesuits during the Counter-Reformation.1

Although Tsar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861, most of the subjects of his grandson Nicholas II lived in conditions of semi-vassalage in 1917. It was the promise of emancipation from Romanov controls, exploitation, injustice and ruinous warfare that made the Russian people give their support to the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s one-party state faced the same crisis of economic and institutional backwardness that had overwhelmed the last Tsar: industries, agriculture, bureaucracy, the armed forces and armaments all needed to be modernized, empowered and expanded at juddering speed. As Kennan and Roberts indicated, a sense of the historic continuities in Leninist and Stalinist Russia helps in evaluating Moscow’s ruling cadres and in appraising the function and extent of communist espionage. It matters as much to stress that the pitiless energy and ambition of the Bolshevik state apparatus surpassed any previous force in Russian history.2

Tsarist Russia

Russia’s earliest political police was the Oprichnina. It was mustered in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, Grand Duke of Muscovy and first Tsar of Russia. Ivan’s enforcers dressed in black, rode black horses and had saddles embellished with a dog’s head and broom to symbolize their task of sniffing out and sweeping away treason. During the European-wide reaction after the Napoleonic wars, a new apparatus called the Third Section was formed in 1826. It was charged with monitoring political dissent and social unrest, operated in tandem with several thousand gendarmes and employed innumerable paid informers. Annual summaries of the Third Section’s surveillance reports were made to the tsarist government. ‘Public opinion’, declared the Third Section’s Count Alexander von Benckendorff, ‘is for the government what a topographical map is for an army command in time of war.’3

From the 1820s political dissidents, criminals, insubordinate soldiers, drunkards and vagabonds were deported in marching convoys to Siberia. They were consigned to this harsh exile (often after Third Section investigations) partly as condign punishment, but also to provide labour to colonize and develop the frozen wastes beyond the Ural Mountains. The rape of women, male and female prostitution, trafficked children, flogging, typhus, tuberculosis, the stench from human excrement, the hunger and destitution that occurred inside the penal colony became notorious as the number of exiles mounted (in the century before the Russian revolution of 1917, over a million individuals had been sent to Siberia).

After the fatal stabbing of the Third Section’s chief in 1878, a new state security apparatus named the Okhrana was instituted to eradicate political crime. Its draconian prerogatives were exercised with restraint in some respects: only seventeen people were executed for political crimes during the 1880s; all were assassins or implicated in murderous plots (a youth hanged for conspiring to kill Tsar Alexander III in 1887 was elder brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who took the alias of Lenin). But Okhrana’s policemen were empowered to imprison and exile suspects in Siberia on their own authority. Thousands of deportees died there of disease, hunger and exhaustion. The overseers of one gang of convict roadbuilders starved their men into cannibalism. Exiles were regularly flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails.

Not everyone suffered intolerably. Conditions were generally ameliorated at the time of Lenin’s exile in Siberia in 1897–1900. While living in a peasant hut surrounded by steppe, swamp and the village dung-heaps, he was able to borrow statistical, political and economics books from libraries, and published The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which established him as a Marxist ideologue. He secured a lucrative contract to translate into Russian The History of Trade Unionism by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The authorities allowed him to keep a two-bore shotgun, cartridges and an Irish setter to hunt duck and snipe. Throughout his exile, Lenin played chess by correspondence across Russia and abroad. His letters were intercepted but seldom stopped: he maintained contacts with conspirators and subversives far away in Moscow, Kiev, Geneva and London. ‘Lenin’s letters from Siberia make strange reading,’ writes Victor Sebestyen. ‘They might be the letters of an indolent country squire of outdoor tastes but gentle epicurean philosophy which forbade him to take such tastes too seriously.’4

At 1 January 1901 there were as few as 1,800 political exiles confined in Siberia, with a few thousand more kept under police supervision, in remote provincial districts, as punishment for political crimes. About 10 per cent of those confined in Siberia in 1901 had been condemned to hard labour. Trotsky, who was exiled to a forlorn village in 1904, used his time to study Marx’s Das Kapital, to father two children and to play croquet. In the aftermath of the revolutionary uprisings of 1905 there was renewed and intensified repression. The total of those sentenced to exile rose from 6,500 in 1905 to 30,000 in 1910. The living conditions of exiles deteriorated hideously. Some sixty of the leaders of the October revolution in 1917 were, like Lenin and Trotsky, former Siberian exiles. They learnt there to be merciless and vengeful, to cherish personal enmities, to bide their time, to foster fratricidal resentments. Bolshevism was Siberian-made.5

During the 1890s anti-tsarist conspirators developed new underground networks, which no longer plotted to seize power by sudden violent blows against the authorities but sought instead to topple tsarist absolutism by organizing the oppressed workers in a mass movement that would be too populous for Okhrana repression. They adapted the methods of German social democracy for the Russian environment. Okhrana agents continued to penetrate the revolutionary movement, report on discussions and remit secret material (the young Stalin, it has been suggested, acted as an Okhrana informer and agent provocateur). The Okhrana’s foreign agency – based in the Russian embassy in Paris – kept émigrés and fugitive revolutionaries under trans-European surveillance. To counter the Okhrana’s countless paid informers, revolutionaries became expert in running clandestine groups, holding undetected meetings and evading surveillance. Bolsheviks learnt, as one example, to write secret letters, which were to be sewn into the lining of clothes, not on paper, but on linen, which did not rustle incriminatingly if a courier was searched.

The Bolsheviks’ organizational culture was conspiratorial from top and bottom. Their leaders acted under protective party disguises: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the revolutionary pseudonym of Stalin because it resembled the sound of Lenin; Leon Trotsky had begun life as Lev Davidovich Bronstein; Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev was the fighting name of Hirsch Apfelbaum alias Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky; Maxim Litvinov was born Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, and had the intermediate alias of Max Wallach; Vyacheslav Scriabin took the hard man’s name of Molotov, meaning ‘hammer’. Bolsheviks were indoctrinated with the need for secrecy: they grew adept in subterfuge and misdirection, and remained hyper-vigilant about enemies long after seizing power in 1917. As revolutionaries they pursued both overt and covert operations to weaken the institutions and governments of their enemies. The necessary crafts for survival in tsarist Russia, including secret cells and the transmission of secret material, were adaptable for foreign espionage.

Leninist Russia

Marx belittled the Lumpenproletariat who made mid-nineteenth-century revolutions: the urban forces that brought Louis Bonaparte to power in 1848 were, he wrote, a rabble of decayed roués, bourgeois chancers, ferret-like vagabonds, discharged soldiers, ex-prisoners, spongers, drifters, pickpockets, confidence-tricksters, pimps, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers and tinkers. Marx regarded universal suffrage as a fetish, Bonaparte as a reckless gambler, his election by popular vote as head of the French state as a pathological symptom, and Bonapartism as little different from tsarism. He regarded the working of economic laws as the paramount and predestined cause of revolution, and considered assertions of collective social will as subordinate factors. ‘The strength of Marxism’, wrote R. C. (‘Robin’) Zaehner, a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer in Iran during the 1940s, ‘is that it is a revolutionary creed which offers an earthly paradise here and now, which claims to be scientific, and which would have us believe that the classless society is the inevitable result of the evolutionary process.’ Communism, continued Zaehner, repudiates individualism, self-regard, personal enterprise and the rights of private property: indeed considers them as condemned at the bar of historic destiny.6

The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 did not fit the principles of Das Kapital. Mechanized slaughter rather than, as Marx predicted, the breakdown of capitalism brought communist revolution to Russia. It was not the Bolshevik insurgents who made the revolutionary situation, but the European ‘total war’, which overwhelmed tsarist autocracy, brought military collapse, civilian exasperation, hunger and fatigue, and forced the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917. The decision of the provisional government, which replaced the Romanov monarchy, to continue participation in that war led to the swift rise of several distinct mass movements: the urban proletariat (organized in ‘soviets’, viz. councils elected by manual workers), the peasantry, soldiers and sailors, non-Russian nationalities and a numerically small number of bourgeois all coalesced into different groups. The war-induced crisis discredited monarchism, liberalism and moderate socialism in turn. The collapse of state authority in 1917 had little resemblance to the military coups of politically minded soldiers, such as overthrew the Obrenović royal dynasty in Serbia in 1903 or mustered for the Young Turk revolt of 1908. Nor did it resemble the crowd pressure represented by the March on Rome led by Mussolini in 1922. It arose from the mass mobilization of peasants, soldiers and workers who were provoked by the injustice, exploitation, inequity and incompetence of their rulers, and yearned to be freed from a failed autocracy.7

On taking power the Bolsheviks sought to placate the mass movements. They signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, devolved power to the soviets, redistributed confiscated lands to the peasantry and tried to vest control of factories in their workers. A giddying spiral of economic collapse, unemployment and mass privation renewed urban proletarian and peasant discontent. ‘In the course of a bitter civil war, the Bolsheviks forged a Red Army that defeated a succession of enemies, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Whites, Allied interventionists, and peasant partisans,’ as the historian of communism Stephen A. Smith has put it. ‘In so doing, they instituted key elements of what would become the generic communist system: a highly centralized state under a single party, the crushing of dissent, and the curtailment of popular organizations.’ Some scholars argue that this outcome was the result of Lenin’s determination to concentrate power in a single party and to eliminate political opposition. Others contend that the totalitarian state was necessitated by ‘the desperate problems the Bolshevists faced in defeating the counter-revolution, in feeding the Red Army and the urban population, in maintaining production for the war effort and in combating tendencies to crime and social anomie’. Once the Bolsheviks had trounced their adversaries, they did not revert to the decentralized socialist structures that had achieved the revolutions of 1917.8

Other preliminary points must be stressed in contextualizing the history of communist espionage in England. Nicholas II, whose Romanov dynasty had ruled since 1613, believed that he was a divine instrument, and that it was by God’s command that his subjects owed unconditional submission to his autocracy. He preferred sacred duties, mysticism and superstition to secular expertise: specialist cadres of ministers and bureaucrats were anathema to him. The Russian Orthodox Church had been a temporal instrument of the Romanov empire since the reign of Peter the Great: icons and local saints – but also devils and sprites – were vivid, active forces in the lives of the peasantry; apostasy was a criminal offence. Bolshevik Russia was the antithesis of the Tsar’s ramshackle theocracy: it was the first state in world history to be atheistic in its foundation and to deny the merit in any religion. ‘The working class has elaborated its own revolutionary morality, which began by dethroning God and all absolute standards,’ Trotsky declared in 1922. Although the Orthodox Church was one of the few Romanov institutions to survive 1917, its influence was truncated. Atheists across Europe welcomed the ruthless hostility of the pioneer socialist state to religious hocus-pocus. Kim Philby particularly but also Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were drawn to Marxism by its repudiation of Christianity.9

Secondly, the civil war of 1917–22 was the crucible in which the Soviet Union was forged. By one reliable computation, deaths in combat, endemic disease, disappearances and emigration led to a fall in population of 12.7 million between 1917 and 1922. During those years of savage combat the Bolshevik leadership made the communist party into a disciplined fighting force: they shed the vitiating residue of revolutionary romanticism and utopianism; they abjured clemency, lenience and individualism; and they asserted the historical inevitability of victory. Bolshevism was set on breaking the sovereignty and capitalism of nation states, installing an international workers’ dictatorship and thus accomplishing global revolution. These great aims were used to justify the exaction of huge sacrifices by the present generation for the benefit of their successors; to justify, too, forced labour and show-trials.

During the 1920s Litvinov developed a diplomatic negotiating style suitable for the dictatorship of the proletariat: exhausting, outrageous insistence on predetermined objects, regardless of truth, reason or facts. Soviet officials had neither the training nor the capacity to argue with foreign negotiators. They declared their position with immovable aggression, and never deviated from it. Molotov was true to his nom de guerre and during the 1930s and 1940s continued this hammering, defiantly mendacious manner of diplomatic exchanges. Andrei Gromyko, who in 1957 began his twenty-eight years as Minister of Foreign Affairs, was a past-master in the old Bolshevik brand of brutal diplomacy and ersatz furious indignation.

During the civil war, the Bolsheviks lost control of large parts of the Romanov empire to the anti-Bolshevist, monarchist and nationalist forces known as the White armies. At first the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces and central Asia were wrested back; but by the treaty of Riga in 1921 Ukraine was partitioned between the Soviet Union and an expanded Poland. Ground was lost in Finland, the Baltic littoral, western Belorussia and Bessarabia. Soviet Russia was seen by the Bolshevik leadership as a dismembered version of imperial Russia. Russian military advances into Poland and Finland in 1939–40 show the Stalinist priority in regaining the lost territories of 1918–20. In the spring of 1945 Russia was able to reoccupy Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and to begin renewing its territorial and ideological control elsewhere. Britain, with its history of intervention in the civil war and as the only western European power with a major Asiatic empire, was a primary adversary, which needed to be met with espionage, subversion and ultimately sabotage.10

‘How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked in 1917. ‘Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruellest revolutionary terror?’ he demanded a year later. Soon he instituted so-called People’s Courts, which have been described by Victor Sebestyen as ‘essentially ad hoc mob trials in which twelve elected judges, most of them barely literate, would rule less on the facts of the case than with the use, in Lenin’s words, of revolutionary justice’. After issuing a decree in 1918 permitting the summary shooting by Red Guards of enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators, Lenin regretted that it would be impolitic to rename the Commissariat of Justice the Commissariat for Social Extermination.11

Walter Krivitsky, the first major Soviet intelligence defector, said in his MI5 debriefing of 1940 that the moment when Bolshevism swung from socialism with benevolent hopes to an entrenched tyranny occurred in 1921, with the crushing of the revolt at Kronstadt naval base. A mass meeting of sailors of the Baltic fleet demanded free parliamentary elections, the establishment of non-communist trade unions and the abolition of internal political police. Their defiance was suppressed by 20,000 Red Army soldiers whom Trotsky had promised would shoot the sailors like partridges. The quashing of the Kronstadt protest was nasty, brutish and short: reading Trotsky’s book Whither England? in 1925, the political theorist Harold Laski reflected that ‘the whole Bolshevik psychology is merely Hobbes redressed in Marxian costume’. The Hobbesian absolutist system was intended to optimize the subject’s peace and security; but, as Locke said, the tranquillity of Hobbes’s ideal commonwealth was the peace and security of a dungeon.12

Dissidents across ancien régime Europe had to contend with ‘perlustration’ (government interception and reading of mail to discover what the population is thinking and writing). The Okhrana had cabinets noirs, or ‘black chambers’, where private and diplomatic correspondence was intercepted and read, in the ten main post offices of tsarist Russia, although this involved a total staff nationwide of only forty-nine people in 1913. After the Bolsheviks had attained power in 1917, they found that a state monopoly of propaganda was the best way to monitor thoughts, control the masses and inculcate them with socialism. By 1920 they had 10,000 officials trained to read the post in Russia. They destroyed letters that criticized the regime, and quoted from representative samples when compiling summaries of mass opinion. Surveillance reports were indispensable to policing public opinion in inter-war totalitarian states, whether Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, and to maximizing the effects of state propaganda. Most militant Marxist revolutionaries before 1917 were ‘staunch fighters for political freedom’, as Lars Lih, the historian of Leninism, has written. ‘One of the most important political facts about the rest of the twentieth century was that the most orthodox and militant advocates of revolutionary Marxism were devoted to regimes that crushed political freedom to an unprecedented degree.’13

‘Russia is a country which it is very easy to invade, but very difficult to conquer,’ Lloyd George told parliament in 1919. ‘Starvation, bloodshed, confusion, ruin, and horror’ had been the outcome of the revolution two years earlier: he loathed ‘Bolshevik teachings’, but ‘would rather leave Russia Bolshevik until she sees her way out of it than see Britain [go] bankrupt’ as the result of military intervention against the revolutionaries. Soviet Russia nevertheless felt itself to be the target of relentless encirclement by capitalist forces and secret agents. This federation of socialist republics covered a huge area without natural defensible frontiers. Amid multitudinous evidence of London’s malign intentions, there was the agreement in 1920 between the English armaments company Vickers and its French counterpart Schneider-Creusot to develop the Polish metallurgy firm Starachowice into a munition works. Similarly, in 1921–3, Vickers invested in the privately owned naval yards at Tallinn in Estonia, becoming sole technical advisers and purchasing agents as recompense for its investment: they were, said their manager in Estonia, seeking orders for their British factories, but ‘also guided by the necessity of safeguarding as far as lay in our power the higher interests of British influence’. Both ventures proved unprofitable; but it is not surprising that the Soviets felt defensive security measures were needed.14

The Bolshevists’ first Soviet intelligence agency, named the Cheka, was formed in December 1917 with the intention of defending and extending the dictatorship of the proletariat. Much of the Cheka’s tradecraft was derived from the Okhrana, including the use of agents provocateurs to identify, incriminate and eliminate opponents. ‘Every Bolshevist should make himself a Chekist,’ Lenin once said. This was tantamount to saying that every communist must spy, steal, cheat, falsify documents, double-cross and be willing to kill. The Cheka’s emblems of a shield to defend the revolution and a sword to smite its foes were used as the insignia of its ultimate successor organization, the KGB. Until the disbandment of the KGB in the 1990s, many of its officers, including Vladimir Putin, described themselves as Chekists.15

The Cheka’s priority was arresting, shooting, imprisoning or exiling in forced labour camps Russian counter-revolutionaries, class enemies and putative conspirators whom they accused of being financed by foreign capitalism. As one of its internal documents asserted in 1918: ‘He who fights for a better future will be merciless towards his enemies. He who seeks to protect poor people will harden his heart against pity and will become cruel.’ The Chekists of the 1920s believed themselves superior to bourgeois scruples about guilt and innocence, or truth and lies. ‘Give us a man, and we’ll make a case,’ their interrogators said with pride. As Nadezhda Mandelstam testified, the pioneer generation of Chekist leaders had modish cultural pretensions. ‘The Chekists were the avant-garde of the new people and they revised, in the manner of the Superman, all human values,’ she wrote. After their liquidation in 1937, they were succeeded by a very different type of political-police enforcer.16

The tsarist Okhrana had been anti-semitic, stoked pogroms and thus drove many Jewish people into revolutionary sympathies. Under the Romanovs, Jews were barred from Russian citizenship and forbidden to print in Hebrew. Violent persecution, injustice and exclusion caused retaliatory resentment, which took political form. Many of the Chekist avant-garde were Jewish. If the fact that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish was then unknown, the identification of Kamenev, Litvinov, Radek, Trotsky and Zinoviev as Jews led to widespread European perceptions of Bolshevism as a Judaic influence. Lord D’Abernon, British Ambassador in Berlin, reflected in 1922 that Jewish small-traders in Germany felt ‘sneaking affection for the Bolsheviks. Many of them are inclined to regard their co-religionaries at Moscow as rather fine fellows, who have done something to avenge the misfortunes of the Jewish race; they consider Trotsky and the Cheka the apostolic successors to Judith and Deborah.’17

During the civil war of 1917–22, the Cheka was responsible for as many as 250,000 executions (possibly exceeding the number of deaths in combat). Lenin took a close interest in its operations, and discounted its brutality. He was less concerned by five million Russians and Ukrainians starving to death in 1921 than by his paranoia that the American Relief Administration was a front for subversion and espionage. In Odessa captured White officers were tied to planks and used to feed furnaces. In Kiev cages of rats were attached to prisoners’ bodies, and the rats then maddened by the heat until they gnawed their way into the prisoners’ intestines. In Tiflis the Cheka hauled persons of superior education from their beds, tied them head to foot, piled them into the back of a lorry, laid planks cross-wise over their captives so that the firing-party could clamber on board the lorry too and motored to a nearby agricultural college. There the victims were thrown into trenches and shot through the cervical vertebrae. ‘The Russian government is composed of utter brutes,’ wrote Sir Eyre Crowe, Permanent Under Secretary (PUS) at the Foreign Office, in 1924. It is important to add that atrocities were not all on the Red side. Between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews were massacred during the civil war period, and another 200,000 injured. Anti-Bolshevik forces seized the Jews from some soviets and boiled them alive in what they called ‘communist soup’. Peasants disembowelled members of Food Requisition Detachments sent by Lenin from the cities to harvest or collect grain. Violence, as Stephen Smith shows, had variable purposes: it killed enemies, intimidated opponents, punished ‘speculators’ who intruded into peasant communities, protected criminals, enabled the seizure of booty, settled neighbourly disputes, enforced ideological convictions, gave depraved pleasure and bonded group loyalties.18

The history of Soviet espionage is disfigured by permutations of acronyms. In December 1920 the Cheka formed a new foreign department, known as INO, to run operations outside Soviet frontiers. In 1923 the Cheka was reconstituted as OGPU. George Slocombe, who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1920s, paid his only visit to Russia in 1926. Kept awake by Moscow’s summer heat, he gazed through his open window: ‘the red star burning in the tower of the OGPU headquarters, a sign of the never-relaxed vigilance of the defenders of the revolution, shone steadily, like a great red eye above the roofs and chimneys of Moscow’. Reader Bullard, who arrived in Moscow as British Consul General in 1930, was oppressed by a huge placard outside the opera house urging Muscovites to ‘strengthen the sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat – the OGPU’. In 1934 OGPU was reincorporated into the NKVD. The later permutations were the NKGB (February 1941), NKVD again (July 1941), NKGB again (1943), MGB (1946), MVD (1953) and, from March 1954 until December 1991, the KGB. These bodies had a counterpart in the military intelligence section, which was known as the Fourth Department until it was renamed the GRU in 1942. The breaking or foiling of Fourth Department activities in Austria in 1931, in China in 1931–2 and in Latvia, Germany and Finland in 1933 was a chain-reaction caused by weak security between different cells. It proved ruinous for the department’s standing with Stalin, who transferred it in 1934 from the superintendence of the Red Army to INO and limited its remit to Finland, Poland, Germany, Romania, Britain, Japan, Manchuria and China. As Jonathan Haslam reminds us, the KGB ‘may have been the largest intelligence service in the world, but it was heavily weighted in favour of its domestic role, a role never played by its military counterpart, the GRU, the second largest intelligence service in the world’. KGB sources give a valuable if incomplete sense of events: the Fourth Department archive is unavailable to historians.19

The career of one Fourth Department man must represent hundreds of his colleagues. Ivan Zolov Vinarov @ Josef Winzer @ MART was born in 1896 to a family of prosperous Bulgarian landowners. He fled to Soviet Russia in 1922 to escape arrest for his part in the Bulgarian communist party’s arms-smuggling. He was trained in military intelligence, sent on clandestine missions and involved with the communists who detonated an ‘infernal machine’ beneath the dome of a cathedral in Sofia during the state funeral of an assassinated general in 1925. A total of 123 people (including thirteen generals and seven children) were killed in the atrocity, which failed in its objective to liquidate Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Prince Alexander Tsankov, and his political cadre. Nor did it spark the intended communist revolution. The outcome was thousands of arrests, hundreds of executions and bitter destabilizing misery.

Two Labour MPs visiting Bulgaria, Josiah Wedgwood and William Mackinder, failed to dissuade Tsankov’s government from reprisals. Returning to Bradford, Mackinder told journalists that he would not revisit Bulgaria under Tsankov’s government for a million pounds, but was not quoted as condemning the communist bomb outrage. Wedgwood contributed a report on ‘Bulgarian vengeance-politics’ to the Manchester Guardian. ‘A Communist is outside the law, and the hunt is therefore up for Communists,’ he told liberal-minded readers. Torture was being used to obtain confessions and denunciations: ‘prisoners come back from Bulgarian prisons maimed for life, the bones of the feet all broken with the bastinado [caning the soles of feet]’. Wedgwood judged that Bulgaria’s leaders were less frightened of Bolshevism from Russia than of western European radicalism. He found patriotic solace, amid the reprisals following the explosion, in noting that the English community in Bulgaria ‘are doing their best to stem the spate of horrors. It is on occasions such as this that even the Labour member may thank God for an English gentleman.’20

The Communist International, abbreviated to Comintern, was established in Moscow in 1919–20 to act as the ‘global party of the proletariat’ organizing communist revolutionary activism across Europe and America. From the outset it stipulated that its affiliates must expel moderates, conform to Leninist domination and obey Moscow’s orders. Disbursements to foreign communist parties in the Comintern’s first financial year exceeded five million rubles: far more than was allotted for famine relief in 1921–2 when some five million Russians starved to death or died in epidemics. In accordance with Leninist paranoia, it developed its own spy network during the 1920s. The Comintern’s enforcement of the ‘Bolshevization’ of foreign Marxist parties, its inordinate demands of fealty and its rejection of collaboration with European social democrats all proved major obstacles to the spread of socialism, enabling left-wing parties to be depicted by their opponents as the dupes or fifth columnists of Moscow. The insistence on mental submission certainly alienated intellectual members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the late 1920s, and caused defections from the party. The Comintern made headway in colonial territories with predominantly peasant economies. Factory workers in European capitalist economies proved averse to risking their limited prosperity and security by rising in support of revolutionary socialism, which had proved so impoverishing in Bolshevist Russia. Until 1934 the Comintern forbade cooperation with anti-fascists in Mussolini’s Italy or with anti-Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; thereafter it accepted a Popular Front policy, of which the first great achievement was the formation in 1936 of a French government supported by communists. The Comintern became Stalinized in the 1930s, it received directives from the Politburo and its officials and agents increasingly cooperated with Soviet diplomats in Europe and the USA.21

‘In our era,’ the Comintern propounded, ‘imperialist wars and world revolution, revolutionary civil wars of the proletarian dictatorship against the bourgeoisie, wars of the proletariat against the bourgeois states and world-capitalism, as well as national revolutionary wars of oppressed peoples against imperialism, are unavoidable.’ Many of the officers and agents in the Comintern’s international department were able linguists and seasoned travellers of central or eastern European birth. Cities like Prague produced alert, responsive men who noticed changing tendencies and were effective in getting what they wanted because their ambitions and insular pride were never as exorbitant as those of Londoners, Berliners and Muscovites brought up in imperial capitals. They were resourceful in selecting targets, laying plans and reading motives. By contrast, many of their counterparts in INO, OGPU and the NKVD were ill-educated, with the guile and brutality that fitted them for suppressing dissidents in provincial Russia and harassing counter-revolutionaries overseas, but less apt for collecting foreign intelligence material.22

Stalinist Russia

Shrewd appraisals of Marxism-Leninism were provided by Sir Robert Hodgson, Britain’s resilient diplomatic representative in Moscow during 1921–7. He chronicled the Bolshevik government’s continuous conflicts with its founding principles, and the pressures which forced it to forsake the revolutionary ideals of 1917. It was a huge challenge to misdirect attention so that ‘a trusting proletariat’ could continue to cherish the illusion that they, rather than a hefty, humdrum bureaucracy, governed Russia, Hodgson reported after the May Day celebrations of 1926, when Lenin had been dead for two years. ‘Moscow, however much nonsense is exhibited on red banners, stuffed into youthful brains, or poured out through loud-speakers to the populace, has to deal with precisely the same problems as any of its neighbours – and is dealing with them in very much the same way.’23

This focus became less helpful in assessing events after Stalin achieved undisputed supremacy in the Soviet Union in 1928–9. Wars, civil wars, threats of foreign wars and domestic class warfare were constant factors in the political careers and personal experiences of all Bolshevik leaders. Marxist-Leninist theory propounded the inevitability of wars between empires, of socialist revolution as a result of these imperialist wars, and of warlike interventions by capitalist powers against socialist states. Fears of internal adversaries and external encirclement were never assuaged. Stalin, though, intensified and invigorated this aspect of the Bolshevik mentality. He convinced the party cadres and general membership that he was a relentlessly industrious pragmatist who could manage the domestic and foreign crises that threatened the Soviet Union. He gained a well-deserved reputation for achievement. ‘He was assiduous in consolidating his power base throughout the party, state, secret police and military hierarchies,’ writes the historian of deStalinization Kevin McDermott. ‘His increasingly radical policies in the years after 1928 proved attractive to the new brand of militant unschooled proletarians who formed the base of the party at that time.’24

Stalin’s supremacy was characterized by crisis-paroxysms of socialist modernization. He sought to transform a ravaged agrarian economy into a global industrial power. The upheaval of forced agricultural collectivization and accelerated manufacturing capacity was akin to social and economic mobilization on a war footing. The first of Stalin’s Five Year Plans for headlong economic expansion was ill-considered, and caused huge instabilities. Bolshevik fears of counter-revolutionary plots, of foreign saboteurs and internal wreckers, of encirclement by hostile foreign powers all grew in ferocity. Opposition was equated with terrorism. Frank discussion and rational argument were precluded within the Moscow apparatus. Britain’s paramount instrument of civilized administration, the ‘circulating file’, which will be discussed later (p. 78–9), was unthinkable in communist bureaucracy.

A new ruling echelon was consolidated by Stalinism. Economic and social hierarchies were restored. The early Bolsheviks had been anti-patriarchal, had promoted the emancipation of women by improved educational and work opportunities, and had attempted to punish drunken wife-beaters. These advances halted after 1928. Stalin, whose wife shot herself in 1932 after being humiliated by him at a banquet, reconfigured masculine authority with his notions of motherhood and the criminalization of abortion in 1936. The early Bolshevik rejection of bourgeois morality ceased. Creative experimentation was stifled: stereotyped party hackwork dominated the arts; nonconformity was penalized. ‘Crucially,’ as Stephen Smith summarizes the development, ‘although the institutions of rule did not change, personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use of force, the cult of power, paranoia about encirclement and internal wreckers, and the spiralling of terror across an entire society, all served to underline the difference between Stalinism and Leninism.’ Smith sees Stalinism as a reversion to an earlier type: ‘the resurgence of … a patrimonial regime in which the tsar’s absolute and unconstrained authority derived from his ownership of the country’s resources, including the lives of his subjects’.25

Bolshevik foreign policy tactics were innovative. ‘The Soviet Government’, reported Sir Esmond Ovey soon after his appointment as the first British Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1929, ‘have inverted the normal methods of diplomacy, and are past-masters in the fanning of hostility to a point which is useful for their internal political plans, without actually provoking an armed attack from outside.’ The desirable norm of Soviet diplomacy was a ‘vociferously cantankerous state of peace’, Ovey judged after some months in Moscow. Relatively minor incidents, such as the defection of Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, could excite ‘a fever of alarm’ at ‘the sinister intentions of the ring of capitalist countries who are waiting, watching, scheming and plotting to destroy them’.26

Intelligence-gathering and subversion managed by SIS representatives, under cover of passport control officers, in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, made Moscow feel beset by fears of foreign capitalist intervention. This feeling was shared by members of the CPGB, which was founded in 1920. Norman Ewer, a loyal upholder of Bolshevist ideology who ran a spy network for Moscow in London during the 1920s, felt sure that capitalist governments must be plotting to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state by either invasion or secret subversion. As he wrote in 1927 in Labour Monthly, a magazine edited by a CPGB founder, Rajani (‘Raymond’) Palme Dutt: ‘I would lay heavy money that to-day the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry are very busy with their plans for a Russian war. For a variety of Russian wars, I expect. There would be one plan for a war in defence of gallant little Esthonia: another for a war to safeguard India from the Afghans … another for Manchurian possibilities; all these plans quite possibly interlocking and correlating, as did the pre-1914 plans for the aiding of France and for the conquest of Mesopotamia.’ Ewer saw the Tory government as pushing ‘a continuous movement in one direction and to one end. That end is war. War will come as certainly as harvest follows sowing.’27

After his defection from the Soviet embassy in Paris in 1929, Gregori Bessedovsky published his revelatory ‘Souvenirs’ in Le Matin. Summary translations, which were supplied to the British counter-espionage agency MI5 by the SIS station in Paris, show the ferocity of communist extremism. Ivanov, one of the Cheka chiefs, had confided to Bessedovsky ‘that passing sentences of death was not so difficult as one might think. It was all a matter of getting used to it. At first, of course, it made one feel a bit queer, but afterwards one no longer thought of the man – the living person – in front of one, and the only thing one saw was a dossier of documents and papers.’ Ivanov admitted that he never attended executions, although he was nominally in charge of them, because ‘he feared the madhouse’. Ivanov’s executioner-in-chief Gourov, who had killed 3,000 people and intended to reach the figure of 5,000, ‘could no longer work unless he made himself drunk’. Ivanov continued: ‘every Saturday night it is Hell’, with the condemned in the cellars shrieking like beasts in a slaughter-house. Ivanov’s assistant, who attended most executions, proposed gagging the prisoners’ mouths to stop their cries; but, so Ivanov told Bessedovsky, ‘I forbade him doing so. It would look too much like ordinary murders.’28

Maurice Dobb, an economist and pioneer Cambridge communist who was a key influence in assembling his university’s spy network, minimized these enormities in a lecture at Pembroke College. He admitted the famine, executions and reprisals against hostages – undoubtedly ‘the Red Terror has been at times exceedingly brutal’ – but most stories, including those of ‘torture’ or ‘the massacre of everyone with a white collar’, were fables spread by tsarist exiles. His optimism was not ignoble, although time would discredit it. The Bolshevik programme was committed to the abolition of standing armies and to establishing the workers and peasantry as the new ruling class. Dynastic absolutism and bigoted theocracy had already been replaced by a federation of soviet socialist republics. Ownership of the means of production had been transferred from exploitative capitalism to the socialist state. Reactionary hereditary landowners had been usurped by peasant uprisings. In consequence of these revolutionary changes, Dobb averred, ‘the extremes of riches & poverty exist no longer’. Although there were food shortages, rations were equitably shared. In Moscow ‘there are no slums; their former inhabitants having been accommodated in the flats & palaces of the former bourgeoisie … children are especially well cared for’. Dobb idealized Lenin as ‘a stern realist. Siberia & exile no doubt have tended to embitter him to a considerable degree. His political writings, which display acumen, erudition & logical reasoning, are invariably marred by virulent vilification of his opponents.’ Lenin resembled a Jesuit priest, continued Dobb, ‘with all the Jesuit’s sincerity & idealism, and at the same time the Jesuit’s callousness, casuistry, & bigotry’. He was ‘a man with a mission, subordinating all else to a single goal … a great leader, a great thinker and a great administrator’; but withal ‘a modest man, who regards himself as the mere instrument of the inexorable forces of social progress’.29

By contrast the diplomat Owen O’Malley, who journeyed through Russia in 1925 and 1941, described it as ‘a spiritual gas-chamber, a sinister, unnatural and unholy place’. People trudged through the streets of Leningrad with averted eyes: they had to efface themselves to stay safe; greeting a neighbour might prove fatal; children spied on parents. A red-bearded Cheka agent dressed in an engine driver’s peaked cap, black drill blouse and blue serge riding-breeches was charged with watching and eavesdropping on him in 1925. O’Malley believed that after he threw this tail, the ‘poor fellow’ was put to death. Even as a temporary visitor to the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ he grew nerve-racked by ‘the horrible feeling of being alone and in the power of these revolting barbarians’. After a few months as Consul General in Moscow in 1930, Reader Bullard felt repelled by what he saw: ‘the unscrupulous deception, the unrelenting despotism, and above all the cruelty’.30

The Great Illegals

Between March and June 1927 the Chekists suffered major reverses in their clandestine work in Poland, China, France and London. Stalin attributed these setbacks to hidden traitors: ‘London’s agents have nestled in amongst us deeper than it seems.’ The detection of espionage and subversion by accredited members of Soviet embassies, consulates and trade missions resulted in bad publicity and diplomatic tension. Accordingly, in August, the Politburo ordained that secret agents from OGPU, INO, the Fourth, the Comintern and cognate international bodies could no longer be members of embassies, legations or trade delegations. Top-secret communications must henceforth be transmitted as encrypted letters carried in the diplomatic bag: never by telegraph or wireless traffic. Although these orders were only partially implemented in 1927, they inaugurated the era of the Great Illegals.31

The illegal system had been pioneered in Berlin from 1925, and had subsequently been developed in Paris. The designation ‘illegal’ referred not to the illegality of agents’ intentions or conduct, but to the nature of their foreign posting. These were men and women who worked and travelled under false documentation and had no official ties to Moscow. If their activities were detected or they were arrested, they had no incriminating direct link to Moscow and could be disavowed. The presence of illegals did not obviate the use of agents and officers who were designated as ‘legal’, because they operated under the cover of a diplomatic post in a legation, consulate or trade delegation. (The exception to this was the USA, where successive administrations refused diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia until 1933: perforce Soviet agents working in Washington or other locations had no official ties to Moscow, and usually worked and travelled under false documentation.) ‘Legal’ officers and agents had the advantages of easy communications with Moscow through official codes and by diplomatic bags. If their espionage activities were detected, they could claim diplomatic immunity. The chiefs of both legal and illegal operations based in European capitals were denominated the rezident. It was usual for each country to have both a legal rezident and an illegal rezident. These rezidents supervised a spying apparatus called the rezidentura.

The illegal rezidenturas were seldom involved in actual recruitment, but ran paid and unpaid agents, and cultivated sources who might unwittingly provide them with information. Many illegals had canny psychological insight, which they used to assess the ability, temperament and vulnerability of potential sources. These informants might receive an explicit approach or else be tapped for information without realizing the nature of their contacts. Officials were targeted, but also sources in journalism, politics, commerce and manufacturing. Informants were recruited by appeals to ideological sympathies or by exploiting the vanity of people who felt superior if their lives involved the exciting secret cleverness of espionage. The illegals identified people who needed money and would supply material in return for cash. They used sexual enticement, too. The illegals and their sub-agents often had to forfeit their human decency by cheating, lying, betrayal and abandonment of the weak. They rationalized their loss by arguing that only exploitative capitalists who were secure in power could afford scruples. Leninists or Stalinists who baulked at orders or confessed to scruples were betraying their cause and doubting its supreme value.

Following the Sofia cathedral massacre, the Bulgarian Vinarov served in 1926–9 as an illegal in China, where his wife worked as a cipher clerk in the Soviet legations in Peking and Harbin. During 1930–3 he was the senior illegal in Austria, where he riddled the French alliance system in eastern Europe and the Balkans with a network of agents and sources. He formed a trading company as cover for illicit movements across national frontiers, and penetrated the radio-telegraphic departments in Balkan capitals handling ciphered wireless traffic from foreign legations and embassies. This yielded good product until 1933, when the activities of Vinarov’s penetration agents were discovered, although misunderstood, in Bucharest. In 1936, after further training, he went to Spain under the cover of a commercial attaché, but was purged in 1938. Recalled to guerrilla warfare in the 1940s, he was appointed the Bulgarian communist government’s Minister of Transport and Construction in 1949.32

The illegals never travelled to and from Moscow under their own names. Nor did they use the passport attached to their primary alias. If Walter Krivitsky, who was the illegal in The Hague using the alias of Martin Lessner, had to return to Moscow, he travelled via Stockholm using the cover and documentation of an Austrian engineer named Eduard Miller. Elizabeth Poretsky, in her moving group memoir of Krivitsky and her husband Ignace Reiss, who served as an illegal in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and the Netherlands (with oversight of England), shows that local conditions and the aptitude of the rezident counted for much. ‘Soviet agents’, Poretsky recalled, ‘were convinced that their historic role gave them an innate advantage in dealing with world politics.’33

The illegals’ commitment is incomprehensible unless one understands their certitude in their historical destiny. They all experienced the reality of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin while they underwent indoctrination and training in Moscow. They knew the cruelty, hardship and scarcities while never doubting the future abundance. In their temporary Red Army accommodation in Moscow, Reiss and Poretsky gave parties at which they could serve only bad herring, horsemeat sausages, salted fish which made their gums bleed, and beetroot. On one occasion a visitor from Kiev described conditions in Ukraine to them: ‘the famine in the cities, the bloated corpses in the streets, the hordes of abandoned children hanging around the railway stations, the ghostly villages where people were dying of starvation and typhus’. Their other guest was a Red Army colonel who, hearing this recital, started sobbing. ‘He, he, is doing this,’ the colonel raged between sobs and obscenities, ‘he is ruining the country, he is destroying the party.’ Then he opened a window and vomited his meal outdoors.34

The development of this ramified illegal apparatus was required because Soviet military attachés dispersed in European capitals were otiose for intelligence work. Active combat in the war of 1914–17 or in the civil war of 1917–22 was poor training for gathering and evaluating political intelligence reports. The military attachés despised capitalism, but seldom understood it. They were easily duped by spurious material, especially forgeries emanating from White Russian émigré organizations or local counter-intelligence. Poretsky recalled one document, purportedly composed by the French General Staff, outlining a secret agreement between Poland and France on military collaboration against the Soviet Union, which was couched in excruciating French, with blunders of syntax and spelling which no Frenchman could have committed. This palpable fraud was bought, photographed and sent to Moscow because no one working for military intelligence at the Soviet embassy in Vienna knew a word of French. Poretsky considered that ‘a surprising number [of Soviet military attachés] showed signs of mental instability’.35

A costly apparatus watched its citizens, monitored public opinion, identified recalcitrant individuals and determined whom to kill. A Cheka circular of 1920–1 declared: ‘Our work should concentrate on the information apparatus, for only when the Cheka is sufficiently informed and has precise data elucidating organisations and their individual members will it be able … to take timely and necessary measures for liquidating groups as well as the individual who is harmful and dangerous.’ Moscow killed their own. The illegal Fedia Umansky @ Fedin @ Alfred Krauss predicted in 1929, ‘there are only two things in store for the likes of us. Either the enemy will hang us or our own people will shoot us.’ None of the illegals was executed by western imperialism: most were killed by the cannibal paranoia of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This phenomenon led to several damaging Soviet defections.36

In January 1930 Georges Agabekov (born Grigory Sergeyvich Arutyunov @ Nerses Ovsepyan @ Azadoff), who was chief of OGPU’s eastern section in 1928–9, tried to defect to the British in Istanbul. He was motivated by both ideological estrangement and infatuation with an Englishwoman whom he had met in Turkey. Defectors at that time were treated as despicable funks rather than valuable assets. They ranked as the civilian equivalent of selfish deserters who had been put before the firing-squad in wartime. Accordingly Agabekov was rebuffed by his girlfriend’s compatriots, although six months later he successfully defected in Paris. The French government, rather than cultivating him as a source, expelled him as a trouble-maker after the girlfriend’s parents denounced him as a heartless seducer. Before his deportation, it was recognized in London by Guy Liddell of Special Branch and by MI5’s Kathleen (‘Jane’) Sissmore and Oswald (‘Jasper’) Harker that, as the most senior OGPU officer to have defected, he was worth monitoring and interviewing. The Home Office warrant of 27 July 1930 requesting the interception of his mail was phrased in the patronizing, mistrustful terms with which foreign sources were often approached: ‘The individual named, who states himself to have been a member of the Russian OGPU, has made a rather theatrical escape from Constantinople to Paris. He has given a lurid account of orders from his former chiefs including the liquidation of recalcitrant Soviet employees. It is strongly suspected … that he may be acting as agent provocateur.’ London’s Morning Post newspaper sent its Paris correspondent to interview Agabekov, ‘chief of the OGPU for the five Mahomedan countries’, and duly reported: ‘He calls himself an American, and is a typical Levantine with yellow eyes and a coffee-coloured complexion.’ These were yet further expressions of that British condescension – a complacent amalgam of pride and insularity – that had led Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British acting Consul General in Moscow, to liken Lenin to a provincial grocer in 1917.37

The deaths or flight from Russia of the tsarists’ world-leading cryptographers lowered the quality of Soviet code-making and code-breaking. Partly as compensation for this deterioration in SIGINT (signals intelligence), but also as an outcome of their inclinations, the Bolsheviks collected excellent HUMINT (human intelligence) from other countries’ missions, legations and embassies both in Moscow and in other European capitals. There is a myth, as Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky write, that brilliant mathematicians achieved the major code-breaking successes. The reality is that HUMINT had a part in most major breaks of high-grade code and cipher systems. During the 1930s Moscow’s informants in the Communications Department of the Foreign Office supplied plain-text British diplomatic telegrams which Soviet code-breakers could, in some instances, compare with the ciphered versions as an aid to breaking the ciphers. Soviet SIGINT experts were, however, decimated during Stalin’s Great Terror. The cryptographer Gleb Boky, who led the SIGINT operations of the NKVD and the Fourth Department, was shot in 1937 together with his deputy. Boky’s successor survived in post only a month.38

Soviet espionage in foreign missions

Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) did not have a Moscow station in the 1920s or 1930s. Muscovites were too cowed to be approachable by foreign diplomats. Sir Robert Hodgson reported in 1924 on Soviet espionage on diplomatic missions in Moscow: ‘It is unfortunate that, in order to establish the new régime – the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat – the Soviet Government should find itself compelled to … extend on an unheard-of scale the most revolting expedients of dilation, espionage and administrative tyranny which disfigured the old régime.’ Foreign missions in the capital were beleaguered ‘panic-centres’, he said. Russians were afraid to attend Hodgson’s lawn-tennis tournaments; musicians were scared to perform at evening concerts. He regarded the Soviet regime as akin to a fundamentalist religious cult at the height of its zeal: a year later he told Lord D’Abernon that he hoped Russia’s government ‘will be laicised, and that normal human interests will resume their sway’. When Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations were temporarily severed in 1927, all but two of the Russian staff of Hodgson’s mission were given diplomatic protection with jobs at the Norwegian legation. Dire punishment for collaborating with capitalism befell the unfortunate pair who were not hired by Norway: the doorkeeper Vera Rublatt was exiled for three years in Siberia; the messenger Surkov was sent to the dreaded penal camp in the Solovetsky Islands.39

Security measures were primitive for most of the inter-war period not only in British embassies and legations but in those of the other powers. The need for specialist advice or strict procedures occurred to almost no one in the 1920s. In 1927 it was found that Soviet diplomats in Peking had recruited Chinese staff in the British, Italian and Japanese legations to supply copies of secret diplomatic documents.

The most grievous lapse began on the watch of Sir Ronald Graham, who was the Ambassador in Rome for twelve years from 1921. Graham made the embassy at the end of the Via XX Settembre, with its beautiful garden shaded by the city wall, into a salon for literary and artistic connoisseurs as well as a political and diplomatic congregation point. Amid these amenities Francesco Constantini, an embassy messenger, was recruited by INO in 1924 and given the codename DUNCAN. When two copies of the diplomatic cipher went missing shortly afterwards, diplomats did not think to suspect him. In addition to cipher material, he stole dispatches on Anglo-Italian relations and often supplied the ‘confidential print’ which was circulated from London to heads of its overseas diplomatic missions giving up-to-date material from important Foreign Office documents and selected dispatches and summaries. Constantini was a mercenary who wanted to enrich himself. Some 150 pages of classified material left the embassy on average each week by 1925. In Moscow, Constantini was reckoned to be INO’s most valuable agent, whose material would betray British plots to destroy the Soviet Union and provide early warnings of the expected British invasion. ‘England is now the organizing force behind a probable attack on the USSR in the near future,’ Constantini was instructed by Moscow in 1925. ‘A continuous hostile cordon [of states] is being formed against us in the West. In the East, in Persia, Afghanistan and China we observe a similar picture … your task (and consider it a priority) is to provide documentary and agent materials which reveal the details of the English plan.’40

Security did not improve after Sir Eric Drummond had succeeded Graham as Ambassador in 1933. Slocombe’s pen-portrait of the new chief in Via XX Settembre evokes an unassuming, dejected, exact and unimaginative Scot who was heir-presumptive to the earldom of Perth: ‘the least elegant Foreign Office official who ever carried a neatly rolled umbrella in Whitehall … he had a small head, a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, a long nose’. Drummond and his staff could not think how to react to the brazenness of Mussolini in 1936 in publishing a secret British report on Abyssinia which had been filched from the embassy. They were confounded when Il Duce bragged that he had a copy of a memorandum ‘The German Danger’ circulated to the Cabinet by the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. They did not know that the Italians forthwith gave the text of Eden’s paper to Hitler.41

No action was taken to improve security until in 1937 a necklace belonging to Lady Drummond vanished from a locked red box in the Ambassador’s office. Valentine Vivian of SIS, who was sent by the Foreign Office to report on the Rome embassy, warned that there was no ‘such thing as an expert in security measures, and I make no pretensions to being one’. He nevertheless made sound recommendations – of which one is especially notable. Although diplomats assumed that telephone conversations were tapped, they were unaware that telephones might be doctored so as to act as microphones recording conversations in embassy offices. Vivian suspected a new telephone on the cipher officers’ table, and after Foreign Office discussions, the PUS Sir Robert (‘Van’) Vansittart instructed that henceforth telephones should be excluded from the cipher-room. A month after Vivian’s visit to Rome, the Foreign Office discovered that the summary of a confidential talk with the Regent of Yugoslavia about his policy towards Italy had been leaked to Mussolini’s government.42

When Vivian inspected British embassy offices in Berlin a few months later, he found them vulnerable to breaches. Security in embassies, legations, consulates and the Foreign Office was seen as a matter of lowly office administration. Officials of mature judgement were dismissive and even scornful of crude espionage scares. Basil Liddell Hart was military correspondent of The Times, adviser to the Secretary of State for War and one of England’s most up-to-date tactical planners. ‘This ugly rash is again breaking out on the face of Europe,’ he warned of ‘spy-mania’ in 1937. ‘Its justification is probably slender, as usual. For the knowledge that matters is rarely gained by the methods that thrill the lover of sensational spy-stories: safer, in every sense, is the knowledge that comes by the application of ordinary deductive methods to a mass of data that is common property.’ It took the discovery in September 1939, after the outbreak of war, that for ten years Moscow had been buying secrets from the Foreign Office’s Communications Department (see Chapter 5), and the further belated revelation by SIS in January 1940 that Berlin had (during the previous July and August) received secrets from the Office’s Central Department, for an embryonic Security Department to be formed. ‘I can trust no one,’ exclaimed the Office’s exasperated Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who had been equally astounded on first hearing the long history of betrayals in Rome.43

It is easy to disparage these attitudes with hindsight. These were men, though, who never purged an enemy, and were never deluded that history was on their side. Their arrangements were no more defective or naive than those of the United States. William Bullitt was appointed as the earliest American Ambassador to Soviet Russia in 1933: he had earlier been psychoanalysed by Freud, and had co-authored with Freud a psychoanalytical biography of Woodrow Wilson. ‘We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union,’ Bullitt advised the State Department after three years in Moscow. ‘There is no weapon so disarming and so effective in relations with the Communists as sheer honesty.’ The corporate lawyer Joseph Davies, who replaced Bullitt in 1936, was a dupe who attended the Moscow show-trials and believed the evidence. The embassy at first had no codes, no safes and no couriers, but sent messages through the Moscow telegraph service where they could be read by anyone. The US Marines who guarded the embassy, and some of the cipher clerks, were provided with NKVD girlfriends. When an FBI agent, posing as a courier, visited the embassy in 1940, he found that the duty code clerk had left the code-room unattended, with the door open, for forty-five minutes. At night the code-room safe was left open with codebooks and messages on the table. It did not occur to the FBI agent to search for listening devices. When this was belatedly done in 1944, a total of 120 hidden microphones were found in the first sweep of the building. Further sweeps found more microphones secreted in furniture legs, plastered walls and elsewhere.44

The political culture of everlasting distrust

The most effective British Ambassador to Stalinist Russia was Sir Archie Clark Kerr, who was created Lord Inverchapel as a reward for his success. ‘Nearly all of those who now govern Russia and mould opinion have led hunted lives since their early manhood when they were chased from pillar to post by